Program Idea

[nodle]

Ok now we hae all heard the "Infinite monkey theorem" before. If you don't know what this is please read here. LINK it states "A single immortal monkey who executes infinitely many keystrokes will almost surely eventually type out any given text, and an infinite number of monkeys will almost surely begin producing all possible texts immediately". So I was thinking, if we had a program that would take a box say 1024x768 and have a program that would change each pixel every second to a different color, could you reproduce every picture imaginable in time? Of course this would take a long time, but if you could use a program like a folding program it would speed up this alot. I'm not good at math, but you could take the amount of pixels in a 1024x768 and take the amount of color change etc. Do you think it's possible?

 

[nodle]

Any programers up to the task? :-D

 

[Mike]

Statistically it is possible, but the reason its called the "infinite" monkey theorem is because infinite has no definable end. The chances of each pixel hitting each color in the right place all at once IS possible, but the number of tries is ridiculously high. Even for the fastest computer your going to be waiting quite a damn long time.

edit: also, when a monkey types a Q, its a Q. only 26 different variations. think about how many different shades of colors there are possible, that you would have to get correct.

 

[C Pav]

I am a programmer at heart. Got my major in the field but have not done much since graduating college. This task sounds a little hard but maybe someday I could try it out of shear boredom. That or I will stick to writing simple spyware like programs for co-workers computers. Remeber that admin? Hey, maybe if we let the moneky write the code it may eventually write the program. Just kidding.

 

[nodle]

Lets start off with 256 colors, because 32bit color is gonna be way tough. Also we will go with 640x480 resolution.

The number of combinations in an x by y grid, with c colours can be expressed as;

c ^ (x * y)

So, in our hypothetical case,

256 ^ (640 * 480)

=256 ^ 307200

which is not even calculable by any means I know. Also consider the vast, vast amounts of screens of random, meaningless pixels which would far outnumber the useful pictures. I guess our project ends here

 

[ndboarder]

I was thinking that there should be a way to check and skip certain combinations (such as an all black screen), but now I'm second guessing myself and thnking that any type of checking would slow down the processing.